Time/Points Competition - challenge opponents in all events showing best time/acquiring more points

All events show the player from behind, except Ski Jump. In Ski Jump the player is seen mostly from behind but camera may be rotated slightly near him. The player should avoid obstacles, stay on a route, and pass the gates in Slalom-like events and jump well in the Ski Jump.

A 1-4 players hot-seat mode is available and the difficulty may be adjusted. The game progress may be saved to load it later.

SuperSki III, the last of its series, is a game about... wait for it... skiing! And you, as the player, get to be a... skiier! Who would've thought, eh? Well ok, not just skiing, there's also some snowboarding events, in case you get bored of skiing.

Oh great, a few lines and I've already described the whole game. I'm not even a big fan of sports games. Ok, let's see, what else... you can play with up to 4 human players (each take their turns). You have four game modes: practice, championship, tournament and single-event tournament. And you also have four difficulty levels, though I'm not sure what they change.

In each event you get to pick one out of 4 different tracks and one out of 4 different sets of skis/snowboards. Well except in Long Jump, because that's fairly linear. And the goal is, of course, to try to finish each event in the shortest possible time, avoiding typical obstacles like trees and flags. As you might notice by the screenshots, I don't do such a good job at that. Moral of the story, don't follow SupSuper's example, he sucks at games and has no right to be reviewing or even playing them.

Oh, and disregard all those rules for Long Jump, where all you have to do is jump as far as possible and land properly. This is, without shoving your face full of snow, like I tend to do. I might as well warn you, even if you land properly, you can't let the guy keep on going after the people are cheering, you have to end the game to get your score. Otherwise, he'll keep on going until he hits the edge of the game and gets disqualified. Seriously.

You can use either the keyboard (arrow keys) or the mouse to control your sportsman, and you can change this in the Options menu. I might as well explain the Options menu, since the game kinda lacks text. The arrow buttons control the size of the in-game screen, the slider at the bottom controls the draw distance, and the rest should be self-explanatory.

In terms of graphics, they're pretty good. The menu backgrounds are nice and it's more detailed than other sports games, specially more than its predecessor, although it has less events. The music and sound effects are also nothing to be ashamed for, doing their job fine, although there's no in-game music. To round it off, the game has some buttons on top allowing you to easily navigate through the menus from any point in the game, as well as loading/saving your game, which is always handy for long tournaments.

All in all, another fine addition to the winter sports games. Altough this one focus on skiing events, which can contribute to it getting repetitive, it should still be enough fun for any fan of the genre, so I give it a 4.

Oh, there's also a few french in text, so if you're an absolute zero at it, I'll translate: joueur = player voulez vous quitter? = do you wanna quit? Oui = Yes Non = No

Last in Microids' lackluster trilogy of skiing games is Super Ski 3, which boasts significant graphical improvements over the previous two games in the series, but unfortunately not playability. The best feature from Super Ski 2 is left intact: the tournament takes place in different locations around the world. You can practice in any event before the tournament, compete solo against the computer or friends.

Similar to the previous 2 games, player animations are not as smooth as Accolade's game, but they are decent, and the controls are easy to learn. Unfortunately, the game is still much more difficult and less playable than Winter Challenge. You view the action from third person perspective instead of first person, so judging the distance is trickier. Also, there are more obstacles and curvy paths in most events, so fast reflexes are required.

Overall, Super Ski 3 is a disappointing winter sport game that could have learned from the playability and excellent user interface of Winter Challenge. Although the controls and graphics are a big improvement over Super Ski 2, they did not improve enough to warrant anyone's attention. Not recommended, unless you just want to complete your Microids/winter games collection.